Posts Tagged ‘Bitcoin Cash’

Something interesting and not so nice regarding Bitmain and their latest batch of Antminer S9 ASIC miners, it seems that although the company is listing prices in USD, BTC, BCC and LTC on their website it will only accept payment in BCC (Bitcoin Cash) for the batch of miners shipping November 21-30. As a maker and seller of these devices Bitmain of course has the right to sell them any way they want and accept the payment in the form they choose, but this way of essentially “forcing miners” to buy BCC to pay for the hardware (in case they do not have it) is probably not very “politically correct”. It is understandable that they want to support BCC, but is this the right way to do it or it will fire back with users going to alternative options for ASIC miners (not that there are many available unfortunately)…

The questionable text about BCC payment for the batch is under Payment and is quoted below:

Only BCC payment method is accepted in this batch, please use the exact amount mentioned in your order and complete the payment within one hour. After one hour, the order will expire and your payment may not be detected by the system automatically. If the payment is submitted but the receipt is delayed, we will make your payment “Valid” manually.

Bitcoin Cash(BCC or BCH depending on the exchange) has successfully forked yesterday around the planned time, but things are still moving slow. Some of the exchanges such as Bittrex and Kraken were pretty quick to respond in crediting users with BCC/BCH coins and launching trading. The increased demand and high volatility however is still causing issues for some exchanges such as Kraken that apparently is having trouble with their infrastructure handling the load. Still most if not all exchanges that started supporting Bitcoin Cash and offer trading have not yet enabled deposits from local wallets. Even if they do at the moment, it could still take a day for a transaction to be confirmed and be credited in the exchange. We still need to wait a bit more for the difficulty of BCC/BCH to adjust to the significantly lower hashrate and the blocks to start moving at a faster pace as they are currently taking a lot of time, much more than just 10 minutes per block.

The price volatility of Bitcoin Cash is very likely to continue as there is a lot of speculation and actually not that much coins in circulation in exchanges. It seems that quite a lot of people proffered to keep their BTC and get BCC/BCH with a local wallet where they have full control over the private keys and the coins inside. This means that the coins in exchanges will remain less than apparently the demand there is at the moment, but as soon as deposits to exchanges are allowed the Bitcoin Cash price may start a downward trend. This is especially true if most people do what they were planning – namely dumping the “free” BCC/BCH coins they have received for BTC or other altcoins. Still, we are yet to see what is going to happen as things may end up very different than what some people expected or planned. We are still in favor of Bitcoin (BTC) over any forks such as Bitcoin Cash (BCC/BCH), but the new fork is already getting decent support and slowly building momentum.

If you take a look at the coin market capitalization, then you might be surprised that the market cap of Bitcoin Cash (BCC/BCH) is already at almost 8 Billion USD and that is placing the currency as number 3 in terms of capitalization. BCH is just after Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) in terms of market capitalization, but that is the situation at the moment and with the high price volatility things could change at any moment. Ripple (XRP) is not that far behind on the 4th place at the moment, so even a slight change in price may cause BCC/BCH to lose its 3rd place. Litecoin (LTC) is number 5 and it is with much smaller market cap in order to take one of the higher places. Anyway a significant price correction with deposits enabled on crypto exchanges and much higher trading volume of Bitcoin Cash could as well shake things up or down significantly, so be prepared for this as well.

Kraken has posted a short and useful guide on the basic steps that you need to take in order to safely and securely split any local Bitcoin (BTC) wallet and get the same number of Bitcoin Cash (BCC/BCH) coins. We do recommend that you follow these steps just to ensure that any BTC that you have in your wallet will remain safe and secure and in your possession in case of some malicious code included in any of the wallets you may decide to use. Below is the short guide from Kraken quoted.

1. Wait until after the fork when a few BCH blocks have been mined.
2. Move all your Bitcoin (XBT) to a new wallet with a new private key. BCH has replay protection, so you will be able to move your XBT without moving your BCH.
3. Wait until your Bitcoin is confirmed in the new wallet. Be sure to complete steps 1-3 before moving to step 4.
4. Install a Bitcoin Cash (BCH) wallet and enter the private keys of the original wallet (the wallet you just moved your Bitcoin out of). To be maximally safe, the BCH wallet should be installed on a different machine than the one that has your new Bitcoin wallet on it. You can find a list of BCH wallets on the Bitcoin Cash website.
5. This step isn’t necessary, but as a final step you may want to move your BCH to a new BCH wallet with a new private key, just to help ensure you don’t mistake your BCH wallet address for the XBT address it used to be.

Kraken does not recommend a wallet, we aren’t going to do it either for the moment, but we have successfully used the Bitcoin ABC wallet on multiple systems, though the migration process was not entirely problem free. There are still some things that need polishing and bugs cleared now that Bitcoin Cash has forked successfully, so hopefully these will quickly be resolved. For the moment deposits to exchanges for BCC/BCH are still not active, so even if you hurry and set up everything and claim your Bitcoin Cash coins you would not be able to move them to an exchange anyway…

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